>I don't know how the market is in Cyprus, but to choose VFP now for new development would be an extremely poor choice if only just for one reason:

>
>The pool of available (and qualified) VFP programmers is extremely small today and getting even smaller.
>
>How could you justify to management investing in software that will be the lifeblood of you company knowing that?


VFP talent pool was never really abundant. You take person and then you teach the person to do what is needed. What is foremost request in my books is some intelligence, grain of common sense and propper atitude twd work
and responsabilities.

If top management come tmrw with brand new project, I wld still do it
with VFP, because that would produce results in shortest possible time
and would fit right away within already established integrated system.
(I am no software vendor/company). What I put lately on my IT agenda is research of alternatives. So far I did not spot product that would fit in this kind of environment/requirements.
I don't know what is happening in corporate America, but here we cannot afford timewise projects which take 1-2 years to complete. We cannot and we don't work this way. There are no waist budgets (nor time) to spend on hiring and managing/administrating teams of developers, while commercial software vendors cannot fit the bill because they are clueless as for nature of our business. It simply needs highly effective inhouse team. We implement huge systems at our new or acquired ventures (whole shipping suite, integrated invoicing, accounting etc) in a matter of few days, and by few emails sent from top above. Typical implementation time is from 2 days to 2-3 week max.
So what would you choose if you lived in this kind of environment ?
Would you (as Kevin honestly did) still choose NET, based on your personall
preference ? Would you be able to cope with these kind of deadlines ?

As you can guess VFP is still ultimate solution in this case. As for future
we will see. I am keeping my eyes/mind open, sincerely hoping that NET will
mature faster then it seems and/or that some other xbase tool with emerge as
effective VFP replacement for the future.

Right now, even with EOL announced VFP is still my #1 :)


>
>
>>>If you inherited yesterday complete or majority ownership of say one insurance company, so every IT related expence as from tmrw would hv been directly deducted from your profits;
>>>
>>>Under presumption that there is line of of mission critical projects needed as they say 'for yesterday' ;
>>>
>>>Which DevTool/Database Platform would you be willing to pay for right now ?
>>>
>>>You know your fees, you know complexities, so be honest.
>>>
>>>I understand your question, but the problem is that there are so many major factors that you didn't cover. You haven't mentioned anything about the types of applications, user install base, environment, etc.
>>
>>You are right
>>
>>To be precise;
>>Let's exclude Web commercial apps, What is needed is old fashioned
>>day-to-day business automation.
>>Single location, up to 100 users, crunching day-to-day business , high speed data entries, lot of data munging/manipulation, automations, high degree of cross system integration, cross database consolidated reporting etc.
>>
>>You are new owner/boss not develping anymore
>>what would you use / be willing to pay ?
>>